Pete McMartin: My present, their future

Oil tanker Monterey is anchored off Cates Park in North Vancouver in 2010. Plans to expand oil shipments in B.C. waters have led to fears over an increased risk of oil spills.

Photograph by: GLENN BAGLO
, Vancouver Sun

A little after 4 p.m. today, members of an environmental youth group called Kids for Climate Action will march on the Port Metro Vancouver offices at Canada Place.

They’ll be demonstrating against the doubling of coal exports at Neptune Terminals on the North Shore and the proposed expansion of coal exports from Fraser Surrey Docks on the Fraser River.

“Coal kills,” the group’s Facebook message reads. “It’s the most carbon intensive, climate change causing fossil fuel — by definition, not sustainable. In late 2012, a proposal was put forward to expand coal exports out of Vancouver by 14 million tonnes. This would mean that Vancouver would export 100 million tonnes of CO2 in coal per year, more than six times what we emit as a city or one and a half times what we emit as an entire province ... This will hardly give us the reputation of ‘greenest city in the world.’”

I know: How charmingly earnest. Kids, right? They don’t have to make a living, pay taxes, put themselves through school. They don’t know the compromises with which adults live. The real world has yet to test their altruism.

How undeniable that is. Their naiveté will crumble under the wheel of capitalism’s implacable mechanics. The kids are going to do their little march and take on King Coal? Good luck with that. Children’s crusades do not have a history of going well, at least for the children.

But if you are a parent, you have to worry about the future we are bequeathing them, or the future you are bequeathing your children’s children. Among those pressing day-to-day obligations of bill-paying and putting food on the table, there is the sublimated and much greater worry always there, the one that nags like a bad conscience and wonders: Apres moi, le deluge, literally? A too-hot world? A legacy of environmental horror?

On the other hand — and there’s always an other hand, isn’t there? — we keep those future nightmares at bay with what we like to believe is our hard-headed practicality. We know what’s what. We’re grounded in the present. We need jobs. We need industry to ensure our continued affluence — not to mention your tuition, junior. We need oil and coal, whether you like it or not. It’s the real world.

It’s also our default position when we wish to deflect the difficulty of making tough choices — the cynic’s excuse for immobility, or for the mere fact that he or she does not wish to have their privileged lives disturbed in any way.

But will that kind of lazy thinking have a future?

Increasingly, I’d suggest, no. Consider, for example, the revelation that came out of the federal auditor general’s office this week.

“Scott Vaughan said in a report that the number of tanker trips from the West Coast will increase to 2,400 a year from 600 in 2010 because of increased exports of natural gas and oilsands crude via proposed pipelines to B.C. from Alberta ... But Vaughan said the government only has management plans, training and equipment for oil spills of up to 10,000 tonnes. That’s a vastly smaller spill than the potential spill from the supertankers expected to come to B.C., some holding up to 300,000 tonnes.”

Which is to say, after all the assurances from the federal government that it had the situation well in hand and that it was prepared for any exigency, its own environment commissioner called bull----, and affirmed what every single critic of the Northern Gateway pipeline (and of the proposed Trans Mountain pipeline through Vancouver harbour) has been saying:

We aren’t ready. We’re proceeding carelessly. We’re putting jobs before the environment at any cost, because we’re supposed to be practical and hard-headed, and know what we’re doing.

Well, no, by the sounds of it, we don’t.

This isn’t a screed against development. We are all invested in the economy. None of us is exempt.

But it isn’t just our environment we’re in danger of poisoning; it’s the social discourse. Government’s air of paternalism in these matters, manifested here by its loathsome demonization of B.C. environmentalists, is an insult. And we can no longer rationalize away the moral and environmental consequences of our exports on the flimsy excuse that our jurisdiction ends at the water’s edge, as Port Metro Vancouver has done in the case of coal exports. If we’re eager to reap the rewards of globalism, then we should recognize we have global responsibilities.

The conversation has to change.

What does it say of us that at 4 p.m. today, it will be coming out of the mouths of babes?

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